10 Best Practices For DevOps

The DevOps has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the industry. Surprisingly, the consensus is tiny about what DevOps means beyond the vision of tighter and effective collaboration and alliance between developer teams and operations teams.

The DevOps means different to the various organizations. However, there is an emerging core of practices that enhances the collaboration which produces better results. We examine these practices down below, remember, we are not looking these practices from the developer's point of view. We listed down 10 best practices for DevOps in priority order, sourced from a developer academy.

Practice 1: Active Stakeholder Participation

The developers and operations staff must work closely on a regular basis. It is the fundamental philosophy of DevOps. A suggestion is that both must see each other as important stakeholders and actively pursue to work together. A common practice among the agile community is an 'onsite customer,' embraced from Extreme Programming (XP). It motivates agile developers to work with the business closely. The agilest who are disciplined take this further through active stakeholder participation. Developers should cooperate closely with all stakeholders, including operation and support staff. Not only with business stakeholders. It is a two-way track, operation and support staff must work closely with developers.

Practice 2: Automated Testing

In automated testing, agile developers are usually referred as ‘quality infected.' They relate to quality infected because of their center of attention on writing quality code and their aspiration to test as soon as possible. As a result, automated regression testing is a routine exercise adopted by agile teams. It is sometimes extended to test-first approaches like TDD - test-driven development and BDD - behavior-driven development. It is because agile teams usually run their automated test suites many time in a day and because they fix problems they find right away. It is good news for the Ops that insists a solution must be of sufficient standard before approving its release into production.

Practice 3: Integrated Configuration Management

With an integrated method to CM - configuration management, development team do not apply CM at the solution level. They assess production configuration problems between their solution and rest of the organization’s infrastructure. It can be a significant change for some of the developers because they often use to think about CM regarding the solution only, they are working on currently. In DevOps ambiance, they need to be enterprise-aware and should look at the bigger picture. How their solution will work with other assets in production?

The suggestion is that developers team need to understand and manage the full scope of dependencies for their work. Incorporated CM allows operation staff to comprehend the potential affect of a new release.

Practice 4: Integrated Change Management

From the IT perspective, change management is the move of ensuring the meaningful and fruitful evolution of the IT infrastructure to support the overall organization better. It is tricky at project-team level because many technologies, similar technology versions, will be used in the single solution development. Because DevOps brings the enterprise level problems related to the operation into the blend, an incorporated or integrated change management plan can be more complicated, due to the requirement to consider various numbers of solutions are interacting and running in production concurrently. The practice depends on the previous approaches of stakeholder participation, automated testing, and integrated configuration management.

Practice 5: Continuous Integration

CI - Continuous Integration is the discipline of validating and building a project, with the help of automated regression testing and occasionally analysis the updated code into the version control system. The CI is one of the tempting agile development practices, from a developer perspective at least. It enables developers to succeed a high-quality working solution safely in natural and small steps by providing instant feedback on code defects.

Practice 6: Integrated Deployment Planning

The deployment planning has always needed interaction with the operation staff. In some cases, via liaison experts within operations usually called release engineers. Senior development teams do these planning continuously with active stakeholders participation from operations, development, and support groups. When you adopt the DevOps approach, you realize quickly the need of cross-team practice to deployment planning due to the requirement for operations staff to effort with all of your development teams. To support continuous deployment, release engineers need to enhance the number of release spots available to agile teams.

Practice 7: Continuous Deployment

It allows development teams to reduce the period between a new feature being deployed and identified into production. It allows the business to be much more robust. However, continuous deployment rises operational risk by rising the potential for defects to be launch into production when development teams are not significantly disciplined. The fruitful and continuous deployment in an enterprise ambiance requires all the exercises described earlier.

Practice 8: Production Support

In business environments, most of the application development teams are operating on new releases of a solution which already exist in production. They are not only working on the new version, but they will also have the task of addressing significant production problems. The development team will frequently refer as ‘level three support’ for the application. Because they will be the third and last group to be connected with fixing critical production problems. The main side effect of this practice is that it provides developers an admiration on different kind of things that happens in production.

Practice 9: Application Monitoring

As the name is indicating, this is the functional exercise of monitoring applications and solutions once they are in the production. The technology structure platforms like application servers, operating systems, and communication services often give monitoring capabilities that can be leveraged through monitoring tools, such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Microsoft Management Console, and jManage. Development teams require to be aware of this practical need or, better yet, have access to a structure that makes it simple to provide such instrumentation.

Practice 10: Automated Dashboards

The exercise of using automated dashboards is BI – business intelligence for IT. There are two types of aspects, one is development intelligence and the second one is operational intelligence. The development intelligence needs the used development tools which are instrumented to generate metrics. For instance, CM – Configuration management tool records who checked in, what and when they did it. The continuous integration tools could identically record when a build occurred, how long the tests ran, how many tests ran and so on. This sort of raw data can be analyzed then and displayed in automated dashboards. The operational intelligence is a feature of application monitoring we have discussed previously. With automated dashboards, an overall enterprise metrics overhead can be reduced dramatically. Although, not eliminated because everything cannot be automated. The automated dashboards give a real-time insight to governance teams of the organizations.